Ramblings of a techie

About me

NMS-8255/80 MSX-2

I am a technical entrepreneur born in the 70s in the Netherlands (EU), raised with 8 bit systems like the MSX. There was no internet, only BBS, ‘Viditel’ and paper books and magazines to get information from. Almost no-one had computers (1 of my friends had a game console) so for a very long time I had only two disks and had to type listings from magazines or write games/software myself to get any entertainment from that magical machine. The need for a good memory (you could not Google) for source code, hex codes etc and the need to write software in your head / on paper first before testing made my brain into something I still use every day and creation of something out of nothing which is writing software which made me an entrepreneur.

Studied CS/AI, started my first company at 15, started a bunch of companies since then. Check my LinkedIn for what I have been up to in the past.

Learned a lot of programming languages and technologies; if you would ask me what I am good at (in no specific order):

My main interest in software are development tools and especially tools which make software more robust, provide proofs and prevent bugs. My father was a pupil of Dijkstra and my professors were mostly also pupils of Dijkstra (at least for the interesting courses) which explains my interest in these things and my work in Haskell, Shen, Cog, Idris. Not to mention my believe that more people will die by software errors than any other non-natural cause in 50-60 years if we don’t do anything about it soon.

Through my work with Scram>Card and my other experiences, my professional skills are now especially sharpened around: EMV hardware/software, embedded financial hardware/software, server side development for payment and insurance, machine learning / AI for data analysis & fraud analysis, blockchain software development.

Current hobby work: a computer museum my town (I own a few 100 computers from the 70s/80s, this will happen in 2016), a Gamebuino game (done, needs testing on the real device), brewing the perfect IPA (we are close! we did it!), on-the-go coding IDE for touch devices (works but primitive, currently working on a new language to work with this IDE), a fast Shen implementation (done, testing), implementing an existing iOS game for Android, a Stack based programming language (inspiration, registered a domain for the name :).